Portside

 My Mother Explains Why She Never Voted

By Meryl Stratford

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
— Adrienne Rich

Your father said it had to be a Democrat
but I liked Eisenhower, the look of him,
what he did during the war.
Your father was so sure of everything.
How could I be sure of anything,
knowing my vote would cancel his
or double it?  It wasn’t worth the argument.  
Every day we read the headlines.
There was a war going on,
but not in my house.

The house was mine, and he was my honored guest—
hot meals on the table, clean sheets on the bed.
The house was quiet and we were calm.
Everything outside was his, the car, the job,
political opinions.  We divided the garden.
He planted the vegetables, and I grew the flowers,
lilies of the valley, tiny blood-red roses.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of its meaning.

All the time I was making beds and doing dishes
I kept telling myself stories.
Imagine—a woman in the White House!
He never thought he’d live to see

Meryl Stratford’s chapbook, The Magician’s Daughter, won the 2013 YellowJacket Press Contest for Florida Poets.  Her poems have appeared recently in Rattle and Amsterdam Quarterly and have been anthologized in MALALA:  Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle Press), Glass Bottom Sky (YellowJacket Press), and Slay Your Darlings:  An Anthology of the No Name Poets (Parson’s Porch Books) among others.  She is an associate editor for SoFloPoJo, southfloridapoetryjournal.com.